With WP7 Mango available for all, Microsoft pushes ahead with new updates

With Mango now available for the last few unpatched handsets, Microsoft is …

Windows Phone's "Mango" update has been pushed out to the last few stragglers. The final handset to receive the update is the Dell Venue Pro—a quirky device with a portrait mode keyboard and a different WiFi chipset from most other Windows Phone models.

From start to finish, the whole upgrade process has taken a little over two months, with most users receiving the update at or soon after its release. Over the last few weeks, certain "problem" handsets—most notably a variant of Samsung's Focus—have also received their updates.

This successful rollout has been a refreshing change after the difficulties faced with the first significant Windows Phone update, "NoDo." That update trickled out over a period of many months, amid problems with failed installations, bricked phones, and recalcitrant carriers. In comparison, the Mango roll-out has been smooth-sailing; Microsoft has clearly learned from the problems it experienced first time around and improved its update process substantially.

Flush with this success, further updates have been pushed out over the last few weeks without issue. These include handset-specific improvements, including driver updates to enable Internet sharing on some models such as the HTC HD7; and an operating system patch, build 7740, that fixes an incompatibility with Exchange 2003 and some issues experienced with visual voicemail.

The Mango rollout, and subsequent patches, is starting to show the appeal of Microsoft's via media. A bit more hardware variety than the iPhone, less than Android, and with availability of major updates that's much closer to Apple's than it is Google's. Future upgrades should continue to build on this now solid foundation, giving Microsoft a genuine market advantage over Google.